


The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 01:42:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda doesn’t believe in newspapers.





	The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

They’re all sitting around the fireplace. Hilda is braiding Sabrina’s hair. Zelda is reading a Vietnamese newspaper. Ambrose is flipping through a fashion magazine. 

Shostakovich preludes, fugues, preludes again on the record player.

Ambrose pauses in his perusal. He laughs, shakes his head, looks up toward his aunts, laughs once more.

“What’s so funny?” Sabrina says.

“Remember that like week and a half in 1988 that Hilda smoked?” Ambrose says.

Zelda laughs now, too, just one huff of a laugh, still behind the paper. Hilda does not laugh. Sabrina says,

“Um what?”

“You were really into Designing Women! And you would pace around the house with your cigarette, ranting like Julia Sugarbaker!” Ambrose says. 

Hilda stops braiding. Ambrose laughs again, and so does Zelda. His is genuine, nostalgic. Hers is half amused, half mean.

“Yes, well, we’re all allowed a little fun, aren’t we?” Hilda says.

“You were rather too assertive for my tastes,” Zelda says, motionless. Hilda rolls her eyes, says,

“I recall.” 

Hilda and Ambrose share a look. 

Sabrina says,

“But what did you rant about?” 

Zelda folds her newspaper, looks at Hilda. Hilda meets that look, says,

“If your aunt would give me a cigarette, I might be able to channel it again.” Zelda puts down her paper, says,

“Might? I bet you know your favorite rant word for word still.”

“I certainly hold the same opinions on many matters.” They hold eye contact for a moment before she looks down to where Zelda’s thigh is just brushing hers on the settee, to across to the coffee table where Zelda’s slipping a cigarette out of its case. Zelda taps it twice and then places it in Hilda’s lips.

“Don’t cough.” Zelda says. “And don’t do that ridiculous southern accent, for hell’s sake.”

Sabrina scoots sideways so that her back is now against Zelda’s legs instead and looks up at Hilda.

They’re all looking at Hilda. 

Zelda lights the cigarette for her. Hilda puffs once, does not cough, and rises. She’s almost in character, but then she slumps again slightly:

“I’m not wearing shoulder pads. How am I supposed to do this without shoulder pads?”

Ambrose jumps up from his spot reclined near the hearth and snatches the newspaper from Zelda’s knee. He holds it up and points to a picture of a group of somber people outside a temple on page 3b (the front now that it’s folded so). 

Hilda nods. Zelda rolls her eyes. Hilda stands straighter, pulls back her shoulders, takes a drag, and gesticulates, pronounces:

“I just don’t know why we have to subscribe to so many of these terrible things. I mean, what have we got to do with anybody in Luxembourg? Or Chad? It’s my money, too, you know, and I’d prefer not to support Red China if I can help it. And don’t you dare say anything about keeping abreast of the world situation. Witches everywhere have kept abreast of plenty for millennia without all the political claptrap and propagandist rhetoric from unseemly mortal sources. What? A raven isn’t good enough for us? We don’t trust prophetic dreams and tea leaves anymore? What about the symbolism of dead twigs? Good, old-fashioned witch gossip grapevine? I’m as much of a fan of modernity as anyone. I love a good motorcar, a cathode ray tube, the smallpox vaccination, but I swear, these rags are worse fiction than any trash I could dream of reading.”

Ambrose has deposited the paper back onto the divan and is laughing and clapping, and Sabrina is staring, and Hilda is ashing into the fire. Zelda is clasping her hands in her lap.

“Are you quite finished?” Zelda says. Hilda takes another drag.

“Hmm. No, I don’t think so.” Zelda raises an eyebrow. Hilda paces again, begins again, “And don’t get me started on the Internet—”

“Auntie Hilda, the Internet wasn’t really around in 1988,” Sabrina says.

Hilda takes a drag, stares into Zelda’s eyes, says,

“Yes, but my opinions have hardly changed.”

Zelda shifts her weight, which causes Sabrina to scoot again so her back is against the couch rather than anyone’s legs. Zelda and Hilda share a look, and then Sabrina says,

“But you didn’t keep smoking.”

Hilda throws the butt into the fire. Zelda watches her.

“No,” Hilda says, sitting again, very consciously not touching her sister. “I was persuaded quite convincingly not to.”

xxx

“It’s no business of yours where I get my information,” Zelda said.

They were on the lanai, and it was a full moon. Hilda’s dusty rose blazer with ample shoulder pads was strewn haphazardly on the railing. Hilda was still wearing the ruffled eggshell blouse and string of genuine pearls and tight, matching dusty rose pencil skirt. She was standing near the landing steps, ashing her cigarette wherever.

“You’re right,” Hilda said. “And I wouldn’t especially care, except. If there’s one thing Reagan and Thatcher have taught me—” Zelda, in her form-fitted rayon dress closed the distance between them in two paces, said,

“Oh you fool!”

If there had been one thing Reagan taught Zelda, it was the second amendment.

A shooting death was better than many. 

A shooting death turned one off of nicotine for a while, somehow.

xxx

“Hilda?” Zelda says in the dark of their shared room. 

The room smells of the fire from the living room, of cigarettes, of candles, of tea.

Of them.

Zelda is half sure Hilda is already asleep.

Hilda is half asleep and sure that Zelda has forgotten.

“What,” Hilda says.

“Do the voice,” Zelda says.

“What voice?” Hilda says, deliberately obtuse.

There is a pause. 

It is so dark. 

A new moon.

Hilda hears a shuffling in the other bed in the room, which is to her left. 

Hilda hears a tapping. Two taps against metal. 

And then Hilda feels a cigarette between her lips.

Hilda takes a drag of a newly lit cigarette.

Hilda rises and paces.

“I could talk for hours, days about the advantages of traditional ways to attain knowledge,” Hilda says.

Hilda hears a sigh in the dark, and she says in a terrible southern accent,

“But traditional ways don’t always compete with or compare to—”

Hilda is cut off not by a .32 to her heart but a tongue in her mouth.

“Is this the night the lights went out in Georgia?” Hilda says.

“Shut up and fuck me,” Zelda says.


End file.
